This invention relates to restaurant class cooking equipment and more particularly to charbroilers which are especially--but not exclusively--well adapted for smaller restaurants.
The restaurants which may use this invention are, roughly speaking, represented by fast food restaurants, small cafes, diners and the like. In general, these types of restaurants feature either grid or griddle cooking. In a grid type of cooking, there are a number of spaced rods which directly support a food product (steak, patty, wiener, etc.) while it is cooking. The heat causes grease to drip out of the food, fall on a hot surface, burn and issue up smoke which affects the taste of the food. The spaced rods leave burn marks on the food to provide a cosmetic effect. The griddle type of cooking is a flat sheet of metal which is more like a frying pan that fries a product without either the smoke taste or the cosmetic effect of the burn marks.
When the restaurant is large or is part of a fast food chain, for example, management decides upon a type of cooking which it wishes to use and buys the proper and dedicated cooking equipment to implement that decision.
However, if the restaurant is a relatively small "mom and pop" type of business, it is not always advantageous to buy dedicated equipment. The customer's taste may change during the day, for example, they may want griddle fried eggs in the morning and charbroiled patties and steak at night. Or, the customers taste may change over time as they shift between griddle fried and charbroiled foods as, for example, when news events report the latest theories on cholesterol or the causes of stomach cancer.
Another consideration relates to avoiding hot and cold spots by spreading heat more evenly, which give a more predictable quality control over the food product. One approach to heat spreading is to interpose a ceramic material between a flame and a cooking surface. A commonly used ceramic is a layer of small pillow shaped briquettes about the size and shape of charcoal briquettes. The other approach (radiant cooking) is to provide a sheet of metal positioned between the flame and the food product in order to spread the heat more evenly. Different restauranteurs have different opinions on these two systems, preferring one over the other. Therefore, a desirable design would give the restauranteur an option of ordering either a ceramic or radiant style of charbroiling equipment, and then retrofitting it t become the other style in order to accommodate changing tastes.
Yet another consideration is the different and changing demands which may be placed upon a restaurant by customer's fickleness. One night, perhaps the ratio of orders for griddle and grid cooking may be opposite the ratio on the next night. This problem might be more severe for restaurants along a busy highway which is frequented at different times by people from many different parts of the country.
Regardless of how cooking equipment is designed, it must still meet the requirements of appropriate regulatory agencies, one of which is the American Gas Association (AGA). Therefore, options are limited. It becomes quite difficult to provide a single charbroiler with a high level of flexibility which meets all of the conflicting needs, rules, and regulations.
Accordingly, in view of all of these and other considerations, an object of the invention is to provide a charbroiler which offers a maximum degree of flexibility, with the least cost and labor requirements for switching over from one style of cooking to another. Here, an object is to enable a change over from grid to griddle and back again with almost no work. In this connection an object is enable a maximum freedom in selecting almost any of many different configurations of cooking surfaces in order to cater to almost an orders that customers may present.
Another object of the invention is to enable an in-the-field retrofit of a charbroiler in order to switch it between ceramic and radiant configurations.